Friday, February 12, 2010

You may have heard about New Orleans in the news this past weekend. Our local professional sports franchise participated in a fairly important sporting event.

But we also elected a new mayor of the city, along with several important local offices. If you had read any news reported about these elections, you would have thought they were less about actual issues facing the city and more about the skin color of the candidates.

All we have is a lifetime of living here under declining conditions and difficult circumstances. We have been here looking at opportunity and people leave us behind for greener pastures. It just so happens that the whole time we couldn’t find a good job, the school system was failing us, and we were all scared of the NOPD black people were running these entities.

I wanted to add a few words of analysis, but that quote is so defining that anything I offer will be subtraction by addition. Just read it again and roll the ramifications around in your head for a while.

On to the next one:

First of all, I've been saying this for a while, but it is good to see it in a nationally read online magazine. Illegal immigration hurts black America. A lot of folks may chafe at some of the truths in this post, but I watched such things happen first hand back in Coastal Georgia. One of my friends in New Orleans is in her 15th year of residency and legal citizenship application, and has to hold fundraisers in order to pay the fees and complete the process.

The immigration debate is about more and is more complicated than the talking heads on TV want you to believe. They want you to hold this issue up as one pitting racist xenophobes vs. American dreamers, and that is just not the case. It is the only issue so turned around that I have witnessed honest, idealistic progressives attempt to defend oligarchic, inhumane business practices and wage slavery.

I'm still waiting for a rationally worded, national discussion on this issue.